Dubai Assassination Followed Failed Attempt by Same Team

The successful assassination of a high-ranking member of Hamas early last year in Dubai followed an unsuccessful attempt by the same hit team two months earlier, according to a magazine story out this month.

The elite team suspected of orchestrating the kill tried to poison Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in November 2009 in Dubai, according to GQ magazine. The unknown toxin, possibly slipped into a drink or placed on fixtures in a hotel room, left al-Mabhouh mysteriously ill but not fatally so. Al-Mabhouh recovered from the illness without knowing he’d been poisoned, only to be killed by the same team about two months later on Jan. 19, 2010.

The article, written by Ronen Bergman, an Israeli investigative journalist and author, leaves no question that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency was behind the attack. The agency’s code name for al-Mabhouh was Plasma Screen.

Israeli spies, for example, had been monitoring al-Mabhouh’s e-mail and online activities via a Trojan horse planted on his computer, and therefore knew when he’d be arriving in Dubai, according to Bergman. They did not, however, know which hotel he’d be staying at, which forced the well-prepared hit squad to improvise a bit.

Surveillance teams staked out every hotel their target was known to have stayed at during previous visits to Dubai, and another team waited at the airport and followed him to the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel, where he ended up taking a room. As previously disclosed, in order to kill al-Mabhouh, who was reportedly in Dubai to arrange shipments of weapons to Hamas, the team reprogrammed the electronic lock on his hotel room door while he was out for a four-hour meeting.

They had to rig it so that the hit men could enter the room with an unregistered electronic key while at the same time not disabling it for al-Mabhouh’s key. The hotel’s electronic records later showed someone tampering with the lock about half-an-hour before the hit occurred.

Bergman writes that the fact that the team waited until half-an-hour before its target returned to reprogram the lock suggests the assassins had “considerable confidence” in their ability to disable the lock. Since they did not know in advance in which hotel al-Mabhouh would be staying, they likely practiced disabling every type of electronic lock used in each of Dubai’s major hotels, he writes. The room had no balcony or windows that opened.

Assassins entered his room and waited for him to return, at which point he was injected with a poison that causes muscular paralysis and — once the muscles needed for breathing cease — death. They managed to leave the room with no sign of a struggle (the police report disputes this, but Bergman disputes the police report) and with the door latched from inside.

But despite what appeared to be a well-executed mission — al-Mabhouh’s body was discovered only about 17 hours after his death and long after the hit team had exited the country — the squad made a number of surprising mistakes and miscalculations. For instance, two operatives used the bathroom facility at the same hotel to don poorly conceived disguises. They were caught on surveillance tape entering and leaving the bathrooms. Two other operatives hung out in al-Mabhouh’s hotel lobby for hours wearing tennis gear but showing no sign of interest in heading to the courts. This made it easy for investigators to later single them out as suspicious on surveillance tapes.

But most important, Bergman writes, they failed to anticipate the meticulous and efficient way Dubai authorities would piece together hundreds of hours of surveillance camera footage to identify more than two dozen suspects and track their movements throughout Dubai over many months.

“The laughable attempts of the Mossad operatives to disguise their appearance made for good television coverage, but the more fundamental errors committed by the team had less to do with cloak-and-dagger disguises than with a kind of arrogance that seems to have pervaded the planning and execution of the mission,” he writes.

Their activities were tracked in part through transactions on prepaid debit cards, which made connecting them to each other fairly easy. Several of the team members used the same type of card issued through MetaBank in Iowa. The payroll-style cards were issued by the U.S.-based company Payoneer, whose CEO, Yuval Tal, is an Israeli-American businessman and a former Israeli Special Forces commando.

The operatives were also connected through phone call records. Although they avoided calling one another directly during the operation, they called a handful of numbers in Austria that served as a private switchboard through which the calls were then routed to one another.

“But since dozens of calls were made to and from this short list of Austrian numbers over a period of less than two days,” Bergman writes, “the moment that the cover of a single operative was blown and his cell phone records became available to the authorities, all others who called or received calls from the same numbers were at risk of being identified.”

Once Dubai authorities determined a murder had occurred, they searched databases to identify anyone who entered and left Dubai shortly before and after the killing and cross-referenced it against lists of visitors who were in Dubai during al-Mabhouh’s previous visits to the United Arab Emirates. The whittled-down list was then checked against hotel registries, and surveillance camera footage was used to match faces with names at the point the person had checked in to a hotel. Authorities searched for those faces in other footage to track their movements. They were able to determine that members of the team had made four previous trips to Dubai going back nine months before they successfully killed al-Mabhouh.

Dubai authorities then published a spectacular 27-minute video compilation (excerpt above) showing the operatives trailing al-Mabhouh from the airport to his hotel room and lurking near his room at the time of the assassination. They also boldly published passport photos of each of the suspects, along with the aliases they used to enter the country. All of the operatives, except one, used a forged passport. They had also altered their appearances for the photos.

Although none of the operatives has been captured or identified by a real name, most members of the team suspected of masterminding the attack belong to a secretive Mossad unit known as Caesarea, Bergman writes.

Caesarea, also known as Kidon, reportedly consists of only about 30 members. According to Bergman, they’re trained in a separate facility from other Mossad operatives to protect their identities and are “forbidden from ever using their real names, even in private conversations.”

“If the Mossad is the temple of Israel’s intelligence community,” a longtime member of Caesarea told Bergman, “then Caesarea is its holy of holies.”

“Holy of holies” refers to the inner sanctum where the tablets containing the Ten Commandments were said to have been stored in the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

According to a 2002 London Sunday Times story, the squad’s members have a four-year-tour of duty and are each fluent in a foreign language. They often live as “sleepers” in foreign capitals until the command comes that springs them into immediate action, “be it the hiring of a vehicle for a secret commando operation or the assassination of a local target.”

Former squad member Mishka Ben-David told the paper at the time that only one in a thousand applicants to the Mossad receives an offer to join the agency. Of those who then manage to graduate from the Mossad’s three-year cadet course, only one in a hundred is considered suitable for the Caesarea squad. During an assassination operation in a foreign city, “only one of the five to 10 people on the ground” actually does the hit,” Ben-David said.

The unit is famous for having tracked down members of the Black September group, which was responsible for killing 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But the group also famously misidentified and killed a Moroccan waiter who they mistakenly took for the leader of Black September.

The group fell out of favor after a bungled assassination attempt in 1997, when members tried to kill Hamas leader Khaled Mashal by spraying him with poison while he walked down a street in Jordan. Bodyguards quickly captured the two assassins, and Israel was forced to hand over an antidote to the toxin.

The group was revived, however, in 2002 when Meir Dagan was appointed head of the Mossad. A number of successful assassinations followed. The squad is believed to have been responsible for killing Hezbollah’s military chief in Damascus in February 2008, when a bomb planted in the headrest of a rental car exploded, beheading him. Another murder attributed to the squad was that of General Mohammed Sulieman, who headed Syria’s nuclear program and coordinated military cooperation between Syria, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.

These and other successes ensured that Dagan’s tenure at the Mossad was repeatedly extended, making him one of the longest-serving directors of the agency, Bergman notes. In October 2009, three months before al-Mabhouh’s murder, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu extended Dagan’s tenure again.

But the mistakes made by the Dubai hit team — such as using forged passports from Britain and other Western countries to enter Dubai — brought political repercussions to Israel. Last March, Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat over the passport fiasco. Dagan was replaced last month by Tamir Pardo, the Mossad’s deputy director for the last three years.

He reportedly opposed the use of forged British, Irish and Australian passports for the assassination, but his protests were ignored by Dagan.

Although Israel has never acknowledged or denied responsibility for the assassination, Pardo reportedly planned to apologize in private to British authorities for the hit team’s use of British passports and intended to promise that Israeli agents would never use fake British documents again.